Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

This conversation is moderated according to USA TODAY's
community rules.
Please read the rules before joining the discussion.

Walmart: Use of ex-store to detain kids ‘disturbing’

Matthew Boyle, Bloomberg News
Published 10:45 a.m. ET June 20, 2018

Dignitaries take a tour of Southwest Key Programs Casa Padre, a U.S. immigration facility in Brownsville, Texas, June 18, 2018, where children are detained. Walmart Inc. stepped into the debate over the U.S. detention of migrant children – and their forced separation from parents – by criticizing the practice as “disturbing” in a tweet.(Photo: Miguel Roberts / AP)

Walmart Inc. stepped into the debate over the U.S. detention of migrant children – and their forced separation from parents – by criticizing the practice as “disturbing” in a tweet.

“We had no idea our former store would be used for such a disturbing purpose,” Walmart said in a tweet Tuesday evening, replying to a separate tweet that called for a boycott of the retailer. “We are just as shocked and disappointed as you are.”

A former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, is one of several facilities run by a nonprofit called Southwest Key Programs Inc. that are used to hold the children of parents who have crossed the U.S. border illegally. The sites have sparked a firestorm of criticism that’s expanded to include Republican governors, European governments and former first lady Laura Bush.

The 250,000 square-foot store, which Walmart sold to a developer in 2016, is now known as Casa Padre and houses about 1,500 migrant boys. They are among the almost 12,000 immigrant children who have been separated from their parents under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all undocumented migrants, including those who mean to petition for asylum.

The company said on June 14 that it had no knowledge at the time of the sale that the building would be used for its current purpose.

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Boyle in New York at mboyle20@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Roeder, Kevin Miller